US intel report stops short of confirming Assad is responsible for chemical attack

United States Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday that the US intelligence community has concluded that the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is responsible for killing more than 1,000 people with chemical gas last week near Damascus.

In a statement released in tandem with Kerry’s remarks from the
State Department headquarters in Washington, DC Friday afternoon,
the US government says they assess “with high confidence”
that the government of Pres. Assad carried out a chemical weapons
attack in the Damascus suburbs on August 21, 2013.

According to the remarks made by Sec. Kerry, the assault last
week caused the deaths of at least 1,429 Syrians, including no
fewer than 426 children.

But despite days of research and an international investigation,
the US says they cannot declare with 100 percent certainty at
this time that Assad’s regime was responsible.

“Our high confidence assessment is the strongest position that
the US Intelligence Community can take short of
confirmation,” the report reads in part. “We will continue
to seek additional information to close gaps in our understanding
of what took place.”

Nevertheless, Kerry all but confirmed on Friday that Assad
ordered the use of nerve gas against civilians last week.

“[W]e know that the Syrian regime’s elements were told to
prepare for the attack by putting on gas masks and taking
precautions associated with chemical weapons. We know that these
were specific instructions. We know where the rockets were
launched from and at what time. We know where they landed and
when. We know rockets came only from regime-controlled areas and
went only to opposition controlled or contested
neighborhoods,” he said.

“We have a body of information, including past Syrian
practice, that leads us to conclude that regime officials were
witting of and directed the attack on August 21,” the
accompanying document claims.

“To conclude, there is a substantial body of information that
implicates the Syrian government’s responsibility in the chemical
weapons attack that took place on August 21.As indicated, there
is additional intelligence that remains classified because of
sources and methods concerns that is being provided to Congress
and international partners,” it says.

During the Friday press conference, Kerry urged Americans and
those in the international community to read the declassified
report that has been published by the US government. One day
earlier, he said US President Barack Obama went over the
intelligence with his national security team, who then met with
leaders of Congress and the lawmakers on the congressional
national security committees.

“Its findings are as clear as they are compelling,” he
said of the report. “I'm not asking you to take my word for
it. Read for yourself, everyone, those listening, all of you,
read for yourselves the evidence from thousands of sources,
evidence that is already publicly available.”

Among that evidence, Kerry said, is proof collected from
thousands of sources suggesting the Syrian government launched a
gas attack last week.

“With our own eyes we have seen the thousands of reports from
11 separate sites in the Damascus suburbs. All of them show and
report victims with breathing difficulties, people twitching with
spasms, coughing, rapid heartbeats, foaming at the mouth,
unconsciousness and death. And we know it was ordinary Syrian
citizens who reported all of these horrors,” Kerry said.

“And just as important,” he added, “we know what the
doctors and the nurses who treated them didn't report -- not a
scratch, not a shrapnel wound, not a cut, not a gunshot sound. We
saw rows of dead lined up in burial shrouds, the white linen
unstained by a single drop of blood.

“Instead of being tucked safely in their beds at home, we saw
rows of children lying side by side, sprawled on a hospital
floor, all of them dead from Assad's gas and surrounded by
parents and grandparents who had suffered the same fate,” the
secretary continued

In addition to social media posts, videos taken after the attacks
and first-hand reports, Kerry said the US relied on signals
intelligence and geospatial intelligence to conclude Assad’s
regime ordered the attack.

Intelligence offering a glimpse into Assad’s army, said Kerry,
proved that chemical weapons officials in charge of the nation’s
arsenal of warheads were making preparations days ahead of the
attack.

According to the report, US intelligence sources could not detect
any indication in the days before the assault that opposition
affiliates, as reported by some, were planning to use chemical
weapons.

Some signals intelligence intercepted, the report added, showed a
senior Assad regime official “intimately familiar with the
offensive” confirming the army used chemical weapons on Aug.
21, “and was concerned with the UN inspectors obtaining
evidence.”

According to the report, the Syrian chemical weapons personnel
were directed to cease operations on the 21 and begin shelling
the surrounding area for five days,

The document also rejects the allegation that video footage
showing the Aug. 21 assault was fabricated, and concludes that
the Syrian opposition lacks the capability to fake the assault,
or the effects of nerve gas.

Earlier this week, senior US government
officials said on condition of anonymity to Associated Press
reporters that the US lacked significant evidence linking Assad
to chemical weapon use. Multiple officials, the AP reported
Thursday morning, used the phrase “not a slam dunk” to discuss
the credibility of intelligence linking chemical weapon use
directly to Pres. Assad